I just came across a fascinating piece of crypto history. Anatoly Yakovenko, a Ukrainian-born developer, founded Solana in 2017 and created a blockchain that significantly surpasses Ethereum in terms of speed. What impresses me most: In just five years, the project has sold hundreds of millions of tokens, and investors are already earning billions. The original investments have multiplied a thousandfold.

The origin story is actually pretty cool. Yakovenko met his first major investor, David Kwik, in 2018 at a Californian underwater hockey club — stepped out of the pool and, boom, business talk. At that time, the industry was in a bad mood. After Bitcoin’s record year in 2017, the price fell 80 percent in 2018. Many investors had become skeptical. But Kwik saw the potential and jumped on board. During the seed round in 2018, Solana sold just under 80 million tokens at about 4 cents each. Today, SOL has grown 4,300 times. With a current market capitalization of nearly $49 billion, Solana ranks among the top 5 most valuable cryptocurrencies worldwide.

What makes Solana so special? The network processes about 3,187 transactions per second — significantly faster than Bitcoin with five to seven or even Ethereum with over 65,000 TPS at peak times. A block is created in 0.4 seconds instead of 10 seconds like Ethereum. And the transaction fees are ridiculously low, under one cent, compared to Ethereum’s $25 to $53 per transaction. That attracts developers. Currently, around 900 decentralized applications have been built on Solana — from Audius to DeFi Land to the crypto exchange Sabre.

The technical innovation behind this is Anatoly Yakovenko’s Proof-of-History algorithm. He wanted to solve the classic blockchain trilemma: How do you create a system that is fast, decentralized, and secure at the same time? His approach revolutionized the consensus mechanism and made transaction processing more efficient.

Who is this man, anyway? Yakovenko is 41 years old, born in Ukraine, but emigrated to the USA at age 11 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The experience shaped him: He saw how an entire economy collapsed because it depended on individual decisions by one party. That later drove him toward the blockchain idea. After studying computer science at the University of Illinois in 2003, he founded his first startup — a precursor to Google Voice. Then he spent 13 years at Qualcomm in mobile development, later working at Mesosphere and Dropbox.

The Solana idea supposedly came to him in a café after two coffees and a beer. Quite funny. Yakovenko brought in four co-founders — former Qualcomm engineers and medical technology managers. They named the company after a surf beach in San Diego where old Qualcomm colleagues hung out. Today, Solana is based in San Francisco and employs 78 people.

The interesting part: Since 2018, Solana has sold a total of 307 million tokens without taking traditional venture capital. Yakovenko emphasizes that he does not want to destroy Ethereum — that would be bad for the industry. His goal is bigger: to break up the traditional financial world. Large corporations like Bank of America or Visa cannot move as quickly as a global developer community that comes together and writes code whenever they want. That is exactly the vision behind Solana.